Monday, May 30, 2011

For central Mass. book clubs
• Seeking others who love reading? Scanning through www.meetup.com, one finds dozens of interest groups, among them readers and writers.
• Leominster’s “Literary Critics” lists 60 members. Find it at http://www.meetup.com/Reading-Sharing-and-Laughing.
• There are 53 members in Baldwinville’s Cover to Cover Book Club, which meets at Gardner cafes and homes. You can find them on Facebook, or at http://www.meetup.com/covertocoverbookclub/
• Candlelight Readers Circle of Ware’s 17 members are also on the Net. Look for them at (http://www.meetup.com/Candlelight-Readers-Circle-of-Ware/).
• Check out the Mark Twain House web site for a listing of Connecticut-area book discussions and author appearances it sponsors, including The Nook Book Club’s Harriet Beecher Stowe discussion on June 2, and an imaginative day dedicated to family activities surrounding Tom Sawyer, “Yo Ho—The Pirate’s Life,” on June 11.

Explore the writing of T.C. Boyle
Los Angeles novelist and short story writer T.C. Boyle, wry and insightful, writes across a diverse territory of very human characters in conflict with their world. While he’s among the most-published writers in the magazine world, not many book clubs read him yet. I first encountered Boyle through short stories like “Greasy Lake” and “Dogology.” Two of his novels, The Tortilla Curtain and Talk Talk, are favorites. His latest is When the Killing’s Done, exploring the conflict between animal rights activists and biologists. While he sticks to fiction, he’s creatively explored the life of architect and philanderer Frank Lloyd Wright in The Women and the cornflakes’ founder, John Harvey Kellogg, in The Road to Wellville. He even hit on Alfred Kinsey in The Inner Circle.